Page 17 of Submissive Lies

‘It’s fine, Thomas. Nothing’s wrong.’

After that night, though, despite my best efforts otherwise, my reticence and distraction made things increasingly difficult between us. He caught it in pensive looks I had while sitting at the kitchen counter, thinking. Or when he came around the corner and into my office as I sat lost in some thought of ‘what I needed to do.’ It was in car rides where he’d be talking and I was staring out the window, not tracking on what he was saying until it was too late.

“Jen.”

“Huh?” Crap. “Oh, yeah, umm… we should do that.”

“Do…what?”

Panic. “Uh… what you just said.”

“I said have you noticed your car’s got a weird shimmy in the front end.”

“Uh…” Think, goddammit! Think! “Yeah, yeah, right. We should… do that. Thing. To get it fixed.”

Shit!

We’d rarely fought. At worst animated discussions where he might call me out on my behavior. But Thomas was no fool. He was a goddamn lawyer. His job was to see when people were hiding something, lying. And now our conversations were devolving. Becoming less questioning and more demanding. More heated. Tell me what’s going on, Jen. I want to know what you’re thinking about? Don’t give me that. Talk to me. He knew something was bothering me, and the discovery that my fetish for rough sex—God please kill me—wasn’t it had him as exasperated as I was.

‘Just tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell!’

‘Jen…’

‘I. Am. Fine, dammit! Just leave it alone, Thomas.’

I deflected every time Thomas brought the subject up, or just outright lied because I had no intention of telling him anything about the thoughts and images flowing through my head with increasing frequency. I shouldn’t need to because that wasn’t a part of who I was any longer! It wasn’t a part of us. I’d put that part of my life behind me, and that’s where it would goddamn well stay because I willed it to be so. I kept telling myself that even as we sat in bed discussing work, and yet in my head all my thoughts were of him shoving me onto my back, grabbing my wrists and binding them together. Wrenching them up and lashing them to the headboard above my head.

‘Jen? Jen? Earth to Jen…’ He’d looked across at me, waving a hand in front of my face.

‘Sorry. Just trying to think through that… what we were talking about… thing.’

Fuck.

I was mentally slapping myself on a regular basis as a reminder I was no longer that person. Yet it would be moments, an hour, or a day later and I would catch myself at it again, pulling out from a daydream of him fisting my hair, pulling my head back so I was staring up into his eyes, his cock touching my…

God. Dammit!What the fuck is wrong with you?

As my imagination continued to refuse to give up its single-minded grip on me, the realization that I needed to address this in some fashion continued being pounded home. Frustration became exasperation became infuriation, and none of it helped by my forced acknowledgement that I wasn’t nearly as strong as I’d always believed I was. That hurt. It was a blade to the gut that carved out a little part of me every time I confronted it.

Some warrior you’ve turned out to be…

To say that this revelation upset me would be an understatement. I was a strong, independent woman, and yet I didn’t have the fortitude to get what I was sometimes thinking of as my kink issues under control. That didn’t fit the model of the person I thought of myself as. So now I was dealing with self-respect issues on top of everything else. My inner critic was eating it up.

-You are the worst. No, seriously. The absolute worst. I’m trying to think of a way that you could screw this whole thing up more, and… nope. I got nothing.-

I fought back against that, told myself I wasn’t the worst; this was simply a phase that I could work through. When it became clear that wouldn’t happen, part of me still pushed back like a petulant child.

Come on, Jen! You can do this! You’re strong! You’re not some sort of weird sex addict! You can stop this from getting the best of you!

I looked down at the paperwork laid out in front of me, thumbing through it idly. My focus wasn’t really on it, though. Instead, my attention was on the choices in front of me. I could keep propping up the lie until it became reality. Somebody had once said that a lie told often enough will eventually become the truth. I’d considered that option at first, but as time went on, I rejected it. It was a non-starter. My thoughts and desires had come back, and there was no putting that genie back in the bottle. That left me with option number two. I could come clean with Thomas. Every time those submissive thoughts and desires got their hooks deep into me this seemed the most viable solution. But there was a catch. Each time I tried to force myself to have The Conversation, I either screwed it up, or backed out entirely.

-Or… -

I pursed my lips. I hated the way my inner voice drew the word out. Taunting me.

Or… what? Option three? The nuclear option. The one where I tell Thomas that we need to…

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